A new study reveals that, despite their best efforts, many organizations still struggle to effectively address application quality. The findings are included in Compuware Corp.’s study, “Today’s Quality Assurance Practices: How Can We Continue to Improve?” The report surveyed 305 U.S. and European IT executives from large companies and examined how companies approach application quality to determine which practices are most effective.

Eighty-five percent of respondents indicated that application quality is critical or very critical to their overall effectiveness in demonstrating value to the business. Study findings show that 63 percent of respondents started improvement efforts more than three years ago, and more than half have invested in quality testing tools for application development.

However, these efforts are often unsuccessful. Of the 54 percent of IT executives who have invested in testing tools, only 29 percent reported significant improvement had resulted. When asked about the biggest barriers to improving application quality, respondents ranked not having standardized quality procedures at the top of a list of five possible reasons. Untrained IT staff in quality assurance and a lack of a formal quality process ranked second and third, respectively.

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